The Awkward Age Part 34

It took him a good while to answer. "Do YOU know it?" he asked with his eyes still away.

"If your question's ironical," she laughed, "your irony's perfectly wasted. I should be ashamed of myself if, with my relationship and my interest, I hadn't made sure. Nanda's fairly sick--as sick as a little cat--with her pa.s.sion." It was with an intensity of silence that he appeared to accept this; he was even so dumb for a minute that the oddity of the image could draw from him no natural sound. The d.u.c.h.ess once more, accordingly, recognised an occasion. "It has doubtless already occurred to you that, since your sentiment for the living is the charming fruit of your sentiment for the dead, there would be a sacrifice to Lady Julia's memory more exquisite than any other."

At this finally Mr. Longdon turned. "The effort--on the lines you speak of--for Nanda's happiness?"

She fairly glowed with hope. "And by the same token such a piece of poetic justice! Quite the loveliest it would be, I think, one had ever heard of."

So, for some time more, they sat confronted. "I don't quite see your difficulty," he said at last. "I do happen to know, I confess, that Nanda herself extremely desires the execution of your project."

His friend's smile betrayed no surprise at this effect of her eloquence.

"You're bad at dodging. Nanda's desire is inevitably to stop off for herself every question of any one but Vanderbank. If she wants me to succeed in arranging with Mr. Mitchett can you ask for a plainer sign of her private predicament? But you've signs enough, I see"--she caught herself up: "we may take them all for granted. I've known perfectly from the first that the only difficulty would come from her mother--but also that that would be stiff."

The movement with which Mr. Longdon removed his gla.s.ses might have denoted a certain fear to partic.i.p.ate in too much of what the d.u.c.h.ess had known. "I've not been ignorant that Mrs. Brookenham favours Mr.

Mitchett."

But he was not to be let off with that. "Then you've not been blind, I suppose, to her reason for doing so." He might not have been blind, but his vision, at this, scarce showed sharpness, and it determined in his interlocutress the shortest of short cuts. "She favours Mr. Mitchett because she wants 'old Van' herself."

He was evidently conscious of looking at her hard. "In what sense--herself?"

"Ah you must supply the sense; I can give you only the fact--and it's the fact that concerns us. Voyons" she almost impatiently broke out; "don't try to create unnecessary obscurities by being unnecessarily modest. Besides, I'm not touching your modesty. Supply any sense whatever that may miraculously satisfy your fond English imagination: I don't insist in the least on a bad one. She does want him herself--that's all I say. 'Pourquoi faires' you ask--or rather, being too shy, don't ask, but would like to if you dared or didn't fear I'd be shocked. I CAN'T be shocked, but frankly I can't tell you either. The situation belongs, I think, to an order I don't understand. I understand either one thing or the other--I understand taking a man up or letting him alone. But I don't really get at Mrs. Brook. You must judge at any rate for yourself. Vanderbank could of course tell you if he would--but it wouldn't be right that he should. So the one thing we have to do with is that she's in fact against us. I can only work Mitchy through Petherton, but Mrs. Brook can work him straight. On the other hand that's the way you, my dear man, can work Vanderbank."

One thing evidently beyond the rest, as a result of this vivid demonstration, disengaged itself to our old friend's undismayed sense, but his consternation needed a minute or two to produce it. "I can absolutely a.s.sure you that Mr. Vanderbank entertains no sentiment for Mrs. Brookenham--!"

"That he may not keep under by just setting his teeth and holding on?

I never dreamed he does, and have nothing so alarming in store for you--ra.s.surez-vous bien!--as to propose that he shall be invited to sink a feeling for the mother in order to take one up for the child. Don't, please, flutter out of the whole question by a premature scare. I never supposed it's he who wants to keep HER. He's not in love with her--be comforted! But she's amusing--highly amusing. I do her perfect justice.

As your women go she's rare. If she were French she'd be a femme d'esprit. She has invented a nuance of her own and she has done it all by herself, for Edward figures in her drawing-room only as one of those queer extinguishers of fire in the corridors of hotels. He's just a bucket on a peg. The men, the young and the clever ones, find it a house--and heaven knows they're right--with intellectual elbow-room, with freedom of talk. Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.

You'll tell me we go further in Italy, and I won't deny it, but in Italy we have the common sense not to have little girls in the room. The young men hang about Mrs. Brook, and the clever ones ply her with the uproarious appreciation that keeps her up to the mark. She's in a prodigious fix--she must sacrifice either her daughter or what she once called to me her intellectual habits. Mr. Vanderbank, you've seen for yourself, is of these one of the most cherished, the most confirmed.

Three months ago--it couldn't be any longer kept off--Nanda began definitely to 'sit'; to be there and look, by the tea-table, modestly and conveniently abstracted."

"I beg your pardon--I don't think she looks that, d.u.c.h.ess," Mr. Longdon lucidly broke in. How much she had carried him with her in spite of himself was betrayed by the very terms of his dissent. "I don't think it would strike any one that she looks 'convenient.'"

His companion, laughing, gave a shrug. "Try her and perhaps you'll find her so!" But his objection had none the less pulled her up a little. "I don't say she's a hypocrite, for it would certainly be less decent for her to giggle and wink. It's Mrs. Brook's theory moreover, isn't it?

that she has, from five to seven at least, lowered the pitch. Doesn't she pretend that she bears in mind every moment the tiresome difference made by the presence of sweet virginal eighteen?"

"I haven't, I'm afraid, a notion of what she pretends!"

Mr. Longdon had spoken with a curtness to which his friend's particular manner of overlooking it only added significance. "They've become," she pursued, "superficial or insincere or frivolous, but at least they've become, with the way the drag's put on, quite as dull as other people."

He showed no sign of taking this up; instead of it he said abruptly: "But if it isn't Mr. Mitchett's own idea?"

His fellow visitor barely hesitated. "It would be his own if he were free--and it would be Lord Petherton's FOR him. I mean by his being free Nanda's becoming definitely lost to him. Then it would be impossible for Mrs. Brook to continue to persuade him, as she does now, that by a waiting game he'll come to his chance. His chance will cease to exist, and he wants so, poor darling, to marry. You've really now seen my niece," she went on. "That's another reason why I hold you can help me."

"Yes--I've seen her."

"Well, there she is." It was as if in the pause that followed this they sat looking at little absent Aggie with a wonder that was almost equal.

"The good G.o.d has given her to me," the d.u.c.h.ess said at last.

"It seems to me then that she herself is, in her remarkable loveliness, really your help."

"She'll be doubly so if you give me proofs that you believe in her." And the d.u.c.h.ess, appearing to consider that with this she had made herself clear and her interlocutor plastic, rose in confident majesty. "I leave it to you."

Mr. Longdon did the same, but with more consideration now. "Is it your expectation that I shall speak to Mr. Mitchett?"

"Don't flatter yourself he won't speak to YOU!"

Mr. Longdon made it out. "As supposing me, you mean, an interested party?"

She clapped her gloved hands for joy. "It's a delight to hear you practically admit that you ARE one! Mr. Mitchett will take anything from you--above all perfect candour. It isn't every day one meets YOUR kind, and he's a connoisseur. I leave it to you--I leave it to you."

She spoke as if it were something she had thrust bodily into his hands and wished to hurry away from. He put his hands behind him--straightening himself a little, half-kindled, still half-confused.

"You're all extraordinary people!"

She gave a toss of her head that showed her as not so dazzled. "You're the best of us, caro mio--you and Aggie: for Aggie's as good as you.

Mitchy's good too, however--Mitchy's beautiful. You see it's not only his money. He's a gentleman. So are you. There aren't so many. But we must move fast," she added more sharply.

"What do you mean by fast?"

"What should I mean but what I say? If Nanda doesn't get a husband early in the business--"

"Well?" said Mr. Longdon, as she appeared to pause with the weight of her idea.

"Why she won't get one late--she won't get one at all. One, I mean, of the kind she'll take. She'll have been in it over-long for THEIR taste."

She had moved, looking off and about her--little Aggie always on her mind--to the flight of steps, where she again hung fire; and had really ended by producing in him the manner of keeping up with her to challenge her. "Been in what?"

She went down a few steps while he stood with his face full of perceptions strained and scattered. "Why in the air they themselves have infected for her!"

V

Late that night, in the smoking room, when the smokers--talkers and listeners alike--were about to disperse, Mr. Longdon asked Vanderbank to stay, and then it was that the young man, to whom all the evening he had not addressed a word, could make out why, a little unnaturally, he had prolonged his vigil. "I've something particular to say to you and I've been waiting. I hope you don't mind. It's rather important." Vanderbank expressed on the spot the liveliest desire to oblige him and, quickly lighting another cigarette, mounted again to the deep divan with which a part of the place was furnished. The smoking-room at Mertle was not unworthy of the general n.o.bleness, and the fastidious spectator had clearly been reckoned on in the great leather-covered lounge that, raised by a step or two above the floor, applied its back to two quarters of the wall and enjoyed most immediately a view of the billiard-table. Mr. Longdon continued for a minute to roam with the air of dissimulated absence that, during the previous hour and among the other men, his companion's eye had not lost; he pushed a ball or two about, examined the form of an ash-stand, swung his gla.s.ses almost with violence and declined either to smoke or to sit down. Vanderbank, perched aloft on the bench and awaiting developments, had a little the look of some prepossessing criminal who, in court, should have changed places with the judge. He was unlike many a man of marked good looks in that the effect of evening dress was not, with a perversity often observed in such cases, to over-emphasise his fineness. His type was rather chastened than heightened, and he sat there moreover with a primary discretion quite in the note of the deference that from the first, with his friend of the elder fashion, he had taken as imposed.

He had a strong sense for shades of respect and was now careful to loll scarcely more than with an official superior. "If you ask me," Mr.

Longdon presently continued, "why at this hour of the night--after a day at best too heterogeneous--I don't keep over till to-morrow whatever I may have to say, I can only tell you that I appeal to you now because I've something on my mind that I shall sleep the better for being rid of."

There was s.p.a.ce to circulate in front of the haut-pas, where he had still paced and still swung his gla.s.ses; but with these words he had paused, leaning against the billiard-table, to meet the interested urbanity of the answer they produced. "Are you very sure that having got rid of it you WILL sleep? Is it a pure confidence," Vanderbank said, "that you do me the honour to make me? Is it something terrific that requires a reply, so that I shall have to take account on my side of the rest I may deprive you of?"

"Don't take account of anything--I'm myself a man who always takes too much. It isn't a matter about which I press you for an immediate answer.

You can give me no answer probably without a good deal of thought. I'VE thought a good deal--otherwise I wouldn't speak. I only want to put something before you and leave it there."

"I never see you," said Vanderbank, "that you don't put something before me."

"That sounds," his friend returned, "as if I rather overloaded--what's the sort of thing you fellows nowadays say?--your intellectual board.

If there's a congestion of dishes sweep everything without scruple away.

I've never put before you anything like this."

He spoke with a weight that in the great s.p.a.ce, where it resounded a little, made an impression--an impression marked by the momentary pause that fell between them. He partly broke the silence first by beginning to walk again, and then Vanderbank broke it as through the apprehension of their becoming perhaps too solemn. "Well, you immensely interest me and you really couldn't have chosen a better time. A secret--for we shall make it that of course, shan't we?--at this witching hour, in this great old house, is all my visit here will have required to make the whole thing a rare remembrance. So I a.s.sure you the more you put before me the better."

Mr. Longdon took up another ash-tray, but with the air of doing so as a direct consequence of Vanderbank's tone. After he had laid it down he put on his gla.s.ses; then fixing his companion he brought out: "Have you no idea at all--?"